Don't despair, all right- (um, more'n likely left-) thinking and stalwart souls. If it can happen in sometimes wishy-washy Canada, it can happen anywhere. And it did happen here - June 28, 2005. The third country to make same-sex marriage legal, preceded only by the Netherlands and Belgium.

Strategy to consider: find ways - other than this issue - to radically divide a party (e.g., the Liberals; Chretien was PM and fellow Liberal Paul Martin would have killed for the position. In the furor which followed, all possible members of the electorate were courted - so to speak.)

The Win for legal same-sex marriage in 2005 ... 158 to 133.

Sorry, can't do the link in that smooth green-line sophisticated way (all advice gratefully received) but the url is:

And Stephen Harper (now Conservative Prime Minister) is busy privatising much of our nation-wide universal health care system, and making huge cuts to various levels of education. He's not bothered much by same-sex marriage at the moment. More money and corporate support to be found in fresh fields and pastures new.

Nice synopsis by the CBC .. including Martin's allusion to Canda's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a legacy of the controversial but judicially independent-minded Pierre Trudeau.

I like this country.

Here in the United States, a libertarian majority of the Supreme Court of the United States of America is gradually overturning laws against same-sex marriage (since only one law defining marriage as a heterosexual rite was ever passed at the Federal level here, and the core of that one overturned in the past year by the Supreme Court as a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution).

Since the Due Process Clause of the Constitution is almost overwhelmingly popular here (it underpins almost ALL civil rights law, so that ALL the minorities which comprise the populace of the United States - the Jews, Roman Catholics, blacks, Hispanics, Irish, etc. - want it to stay law) I don't anticipate any serious move to repeal it.

Thus, in American law, it's not so much that same-sex marriage is going to be made the law of the land by Congress - no votes for that in the next two years - but that any attempts to outlaw it are going to be struck down in court on Constitutional grounds as soon as they reach the Supreme Court for review, and this is indeed happening with alacrity and regularity.

Three cheers for Constitutional government (with a "little book," as Piers Morgan derided it)!

__________________
"The proper study of man is everything." C.S. Lewis

"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous." P.J. O'Rourke

Piers Morgan is handy as a target for derision himself. I think we were a little startled to see the US invite him over to be honest. But then, you did nick John Oliver from us too... balance in all things.

You were surprised at Piers Morgan being admitted to the US and being given a work permit? Imagine my surprise! I was sure that the laws against "undesirable aliens" being given permission to enter our nation would have kept him out. Hacking someone else's cell phone or ordering such to be done (making him the fautor of that crime, or at the very least a conspirator) is a felony here.

But we also got John Oliver and Niall Ferguson, so it's more or less even. And Morgan's learned that the politically correct can be fickle friends. So has Martin Bashir, for that matter.

__________________
"The proper study of man is everything." C.S. Lewis

"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous." P.J. O'Rourke

Don't despair, all right- (um, more'n likely left-) thinking and stalwart souls. If it can happen in sometimes wishy-washy Canada, it can happen anywhere. And it did happen here - June 28, 2005. The third country to make same-sex marriage legal, preceded only by the Netherlands and Belgium.

Strategy to consider: find ways - other than this issue - to radically divide a party (e.g., the Liberals; Chretien was PM and fellow Liberal Paul Martin would have killed for the position. In the furor which followed, all possible members of the electorate were courted - so to speak.)

The Win for legal same-sex marriage in 2005 ... 158 to 133.

Sorry, can't do the link in that smooth green-line sophisticated way (all advice gratefully received) but the url is:

And Stephen Harper (now Conservative Prime Minister) is busy privatising much of our nation-wide universal health care system, and making huge cuts to various levels of education. He's not bothered much by same-sex marriage at the moment. More money and corporate support to be found in fresh fields and pastures new.

Nice synopsis by the CBC .. including Martin's allusion to Canda's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a legacy of the controversial but judicially independent-minded Pierre Trudeau.

I like this country.

And to your country's south, we've gotten with the program, if only by judicial means.

June 26th, 2015 saw the Supreme Court of the United States of America rule (in Obergefell v. Hodges) that same-sex couples are entitled under the Equal Treatment clause (the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution) to marry throughout the United States of America.

It's an ugly win - it'd have been better if Congress would have shown some moral courage and changed the law themselves, but we have the voters we have, and only recently has the percentage of Americans shown in polls to support gay marriage gotten much higher than fifty percent (it stands at sixty percent now, but a poll isn't a Congressional election, where thirty-second ads tell voters what they think, and the Left's own crimes against representative democracy are losing elections for them here).

Throw party politics into the mess, and it'll be a while before our Congress catches up with the Supreme Court. And it was almost twenty years before Congress caught up with the Supremes on things like racial discrimination - mixed-race marriages were against the law in much of the US until a Supreme Court ruling in 1967.

__________________
"The proper study of man is everything." C.S. Lewis

"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous." P.J. O'Rourke

Thanks, and I'm optimistic that even though the next Supreme Court nominee will likely be a right-wing statist, we'll still have the libertarian balance we had before Justice Samuel Alito's untimely death, and continue to have decisions which (through winding and tortuous routes) benefit individuals over government.

The only truly disappointing ruling in the past eight years I can point to is Chief Justice Roberts' defense of Obamacare (which compels some Americans to buy overpriced, overtaxed insurance policies to finance giveaways of coverage to other Americans) under the taxation clause of the Constitution. But Congress and the new President are now agreed that this is an error in dire need of correction (so that working Americans can once again afford to actually seek medical care before their health deteriorates to the point they're hospitalized).

__________________
"The proper study of man is everything." C.S. Lewis

"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous." P.J. O'Rourke